The undersigned residents of the City of Los Angeles Council District 7 have authored this open letter to Mayor Eric Garcetti, Council Member Felipe Fuentes and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck. This open letter is being published because serious threats to our safety, the safety of our children, and the peaceful enjoyment of our neighborhoods have not been adequately addressed by the City of Los Angeles.
We, the undersigned, are in a near constant state of siege. Criminal transients and drug dealers are infesting our local parks. They have been selling drugs in Big Tujunga Wash and other local areas with near impunity. They are destroying sensitive, protected ecosystems; using the streams as a toilet and ruining precious water resources. We live in fear that fires routinely set by the homeless in tinder dry brush will destroy the forest, not to mention the many homes and lives that are in close proximity. Transients are attacking people in their cars. They have even been accused of committing two murders in Sunland‐Tujunga over the last month.
Residents in this area suffer criminal transients using Big Tujunga Wash as a base from which to break into our homes. During one such occurrence, 911 was called but LAPD did not respond until long after the residents themselves had armed themselves for protection, risen up, and chased the criminals back into the wash. This has become the Wild West and we are tired of it.
Our quality of life and safety has been deteriorating for several years but this deterioration accelerated dramatically after the passage of Proposition 47, the “Criminal Sentences, Misdemeanor Penalties Initiative Statute.” This measure has resulted in an explosion of crime and transiency in our community. Many law enforcement officials agree with this evaluation, including Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell.
Much of this crime goes unreported; people have given up calling the police since there is often no response. The Los Angeles City Council voted to support Proposition 47 and influenced thousands of innocent and unsuspecting citizens to vote for its passage. Now, people are dying because of it. The City has a responsibility to fix the mess it helped to create.
In order to quell the growing anger over this crisis, our representatives have framed it as a simple “homeless” problem with the obvious intent to engender sympathy and to marginalize concerned citizens’ calls for enforcement of the few laws we have left that are designed to protect us from this plague. We have sympathy for the homeless but we will no longer be silenced by those who seek to demonize us for simply wanting to be safe in our own homes.
The signers of this letter do understand that there are homeless persons in CD7 who are in dire need of services and supportive housing. They are homeless for a variety of reasons such as mental illness, age, the poor local economy or drug/alcohol addiction. We sincerely want to help those persons. Many of us donate time and treasure to fighting this heartbreaking problem. We absolutely support housing and services for those who will accept it. But this is not the main issue challenging us and it should not be the City’s exclusive focus.
Sunland‐Tujunga is now being called by some the “transient capital of the foothills.” An LA Family Housing employee opined recently that Big Tujunga Wash had become the most impacted area in Los Angeles other than downtown. We are told by the mayor and Mr. Fuentes that offering more and more homeless services and establishing more supportive housing in our neighborhoods will address the issue. We believe this is untrue and is cynical political posturing meant to quiet us. It is well known in this community that the vast majority of the people contributing to the deterioration of our quality of life have no desire for housing. They steadfastly refuse it in order to continue feeding their drug habit, selling drugs, and/or committing other crimes. These transients are not the traditional homeless and should not be treated as such.
Instead of focusing on the real problem overwhelming Council District 7, Mr. Fuentes recently, unilaterally and without consultation, evicted the Sunland‐Tujunga Neighborhood Council from their offices to make room for an increased presence of LA Family Housing. Now it is the STNC that is homeless. In order to continue serving the community, the STNC is forced to expend what little resources it has to pay for office space. This is contrary to the interests of the community and will result in fewer services available to it.
In the face of the crisis brought on by lack of enforcement, the passage of Prop. 47 and because we have been receiving little or no help from our representatives, more than 200 private citizens, most of whom are members of a group formed to support this letter, recently banded together and lawfully cleaned out the worst section of Big Tujunga Wash of drug dealers, and transients. For three weeks after eviction notices were served on the transients, (can you believe we had to serve eviction notices to criminal drug dealing trespassers?) LA Family Housing was in the wash trying to convince those living there to accept housing; almost nobody accepted.
When the community was preparing to organize and mount this Herculean task, we reached out to Mr. Fuentes for help. He flatly refused. In a recent Los Angeles Times article about the topic, Mr. Fuentes said the city was “limited by constitutional constraints and its own homeless ordinance from removing people from public property and confiscating their property, while private property owners are responsible for abating nuisances on their land.”
Hiding behind the constitution and City ordinances is disingenuous. The next paragraph in the Times’ article includes comments by Mr. Fuentes that the city did, in fact, conduct its own clean out in an upper area of Big Tujunga Wash. But instead of being performed for the safety of the families in nearby neighborhoods impacted by crime, Mr. Fuentes said it was for the safety of the “homeless” in advance of the onset of El Nino. The city’s actions served to move more transients onto the private property that Mr. Fuentes refused to address. The “nuisances” Mr. Fuentes says need to be addressed by private citizens have been inflicted on them, in large part, by the City.
Faced with Mr. Fuentes’ refusal to help the community, we reached out to Assemblymember Patty Lopez who instantly lent her assistance. She saw no legal conflict in helping her constituents, which includes the land owner whose property had been devastated by public policy, a policy that the owner could neither control nor afford to correct given limited personal resources. Many of Mr. Fuentes’ constituents donated money and sweat to the effort. Along with the land owner, it cost private citizens over $15,000.00 to do the City’s work. But that’s far less than the $300,000.00 Mr. Fuentes said the City spent on its own incomplete and ineffective clean out several weeks before.
Volunteers collected quantities of stashed drugs such as heroin, Rohypnol and methamphetamine to name just a few. Stolen credit cards, mail, paychecks and driver’s licenses were turned over to the authorities. The wash had become a place of crime and death. The stream, once a favorite spot for scout troops, fishermen, dog walkers and nature lovers had become fouled by copious amounts of human waste, heroin needles, trash and hundreds of bicycles stolen from our children. And the wash became that way, at least in part, due to the policies and neglect of our elected representatives.
As a result of the clearing of Big Tujunga Wash, it’s reported that a minority of those who used to reside there have changed their minds and accepted housing. We are gratified that this action, taken exclusively by private citizens at their own expense, has yielded those positive results. If the wash had not been cleared, these souls would have had little motivation to better their lives. However, the transients and drug dealers who are most responsible for the problems we are experiencing are still at large. This is not a homeless crisis that requires more beds, it is a criminal transient crisis born of Prop. 47 combined with years of lack of enforcement and finger‐pointing between agencies.
When the Day Street Apartments were built in Tujunga, it was sold as a cure for the increase in our local homeless population. But very few locals accepted housing. Today, most of the residents of Day Street are from out of the area. This is because our problem is not homelessness; it’s transiency, criminal drug dealing, and drug use by persons who were formerly incarcerated. We reject the building of more shelters in our neighborhoods. We welcome them in areas well removed from them, our schools and our children.
Neighboring cities of Burbank and Glendale have 10% of the problem that exists in City Council District 7. The officials in those cities allow their police to enforce “quality of life laws” that ours have directed LAPD to ignore. They provide adequate funding to their law enforcement professionals. LAPD officers are excellent, dedicated professionals. But LAPD does not have the resources to police this area. As an example, Burbank is a city of 17 square miles. Foothill Division is 43 square miles; yet, Burbank fields the same number of officers on patrol at any one time as Foothill Division. LAPD closed the jail and property department at Foothill, reportedly to save money. Now, when an officer makes an arrest he must first complete paperwork at Foothill, drive to the jail in Van Nuys, and then drive back to Foothill before returning to patrol. One arrest can take two officers off the street for four hours. Officers are often confronted with the painful decision to avoid making an arrest for a lesser crime because they want to be on the street in case a life or death matter arises. Who can blame them? To make matters worse, civilian staff was let go and officers that used to be on patrol are now working at a desk. We hear all the time that Los Angeles has almost 10,000 officers. What we are not told is that only 6,000 of them are patrolling while the rest are pushing paper.
The undersigned respectfully demand that our council member, mayor and police chief work to immediately do the following:
1. Reopen the jail and Property Department at Foothill Division
2. Increase the number of patrols and officers throughout CD7
3. Rehire civilian employees at Foothill Division so that our officers can spend more time on the street
4. Initiate regular patrols of all areas of Big Tujunga Wash and hillsides throughout CD7 by the LAPD Off Road Unit
5. Coordinate with other agencies such as DWP and General Services to have regular patrols occur in Big Tujunga Wash, Little Tujunga Wash and hillside areas not under LAPD jurisdiction
6. Enforce vagrancy, loitering, public intoxication, aggressive panhandling, and trespassing laws
7. Move for‐profit recycling centers away from our neighborhoods and schools since they attract transients who steal recyclables to sell for drugs and alcohol
8. To the extent that your offices allow, publicly work to support and effect the repeal of Prop. 47
We are voting citizens of this council district and the City of Los Angeles. In the next election, we will use our vote to signal our approval or disapproval of your work to help our community recover from our current challenges.

One Response to “CD7 Open Letter to Mayor Garcetti, Council Member Felipe Fuentes & LAPD Chief Charlie Beck”

Dear Brian Schneider,
I just read your “Open Letter” for the first time, and thank you and all of those who signed it.
I live in Arleta, and we have experienced much of what you have addressed, yet on a smaller scale than the Tujunga Wash.

Arleta has 2 huge flood control spreading grounds, connected by a 2 mile long flood control channel that runs North/South through Arleta. Many Homeless live under the Bridges of that channel, plus the Caltrans Easements of both the I-5 Golden State Fwy. and the SR118 Ronald Reagan Fwy.

To make matters worse, Pacoima Beautiful (Non-Profit) wants to convert the current service road that runs along the Pacoima Diversion Channel to an Open Space Pathway, which is currently restricted to L. A. County Flood Control District Personnel.
That service road is directly adjacent to Homeowners back fences and walls and very isolated from public or Police view.
Great idea for Walkers and Bicyclists, but will essentially create an Escape Route and place to congregate at night.

I would prefer to tolerate the Homeless living there under the Bridges than the creation of a “Crime Alley” being built.
I live just 1 Block from the Channel.

If, the “Social Justice” people get their way, and I predict they will, I no longer want to live in Arleta, and will end up living in a subsidized apartment.